This year’s Group of Seven (G7) Summit is happening this week in Hiroshima, Japan. As host to the annual gathering of leaders from the world’s most advanced economies, Japan is expected to use the summit to advance its agenda of promoting gas and other detrimental energy systems in Asia – even in developing and climate-vulnerable countries like the Philippines.

In a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, CEED Executive Director Gerry Arances called out Japan’s push for gas and other false solutions in the Philippines, placing in peril our hope for a swift renewable energy transition and risking the welfare of people and biodiversity. Arances was present alongside Oil Change International, Coastal Livelihood and Environmental Action Network – Bangladesh, and Friends of the Earth Indonesia.

As an excerpt from an article by the Research Institute for Environmental Finance reads:

Japan’s public and private sectors are exporting to Asia the Green Transformation (GX) concept based on the “Japanese version of transition finance” promoted domestically, with the aim of preserving Asia’s fossil fuel energy system.

Gerry Arances from the Philippines said, “Ammonia co-firing, CCS, LNG power generation, and others which the Japanese government presents as ‘energy security,’ are polluting the environment. They are dirty, deadly, and highly expensive energy. Japan is forcing these on us under the guise of a transition, but we know that only Japanese companies and financial institutions will benefit from all of this.”

Furthermore, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Osaka Gas have invested in the Philippines in the rich marine ecological zone of the Verde Island Passage (VIP), known as the “Amazon of the oceans” in the Philippines. He also raised alarm over the plan to develop the Ilijan LNG import terminal project in Batangas, a province along the VIP.

Full article in Japanese at https://rief-jp.org/ct7/135521.

*Photo courtesy of partners.